


Altitude

by pickledragon



Series: All We Can Give [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Gen, Light Angst, These Boys are a MESS, don't worry theres a happy ending, expect every friendship paring out their but i'll tag the major ones as they appear, i acknowledge only the marvel movies i care about, maybe major character death? but nothing not in canon, more characters will appear with time, natasha/bucky if you squint in ch3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2019-09-20 07:40:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pickledragon/pseuds/pickledragon
Summary: There are many worlds.In some, their whole lives are spent without thought of a war.In others, they never meet, living parallel lines, always together but never intersecting.In two, they rewind the moment in their heads every day, the rushing of the wind in their ears, the phantom of a hand slipping out of their grasp.A man fell off the train.A look at the lives of a Bucky who made it to the 21st century and a Steve in a different MCU.





	1. The Act of Falling

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays! This is gonna be a relatively big one.
> 
> The entire thing is actually written out, it just needs to be edited and revised.

A man fell off the train. 

In one world, it was Bucky, holding on for dear life to the edge of a speeding train car, his hand outstretched to Steve’s. He fell.  
Steve didn’t sleep that night, or any other past it. A day later, he traced the train tracks for miles back. Nothing. The day after that Steve marched onwards, razing his way across the continent to the Red Skull.  
It was never the same with the Commandos. Steve didn't blame them. The Sergeant, the glue that held them all together, was split against the rocks, buried under the snow. 

In another, it was Steve. He had tossed his shield to Bucky when a blast caught him mid-stride and threw him into the sky. He didn’t even have time to scream.  
Bucky took the shield. That night, he led the Howling Commandos down into the ravine, against orders. They searched all night, but he was gone.  
Things were different, with the team. More impersonal. More brittle. It made sense, their heart was gone, vanished into the cold. 

Both men were found in the husk of a bar afterwards, stock drained dry trying to drown out sorrows that couldn't be silenced.

Peggy Carter, in both worlds, was a woman who knew loss. She offered words, sweeter to Steve, but biting nonetheless. "Is this your line in the sand, soldier?" she asked. It was not really a question. "There's a war all around us. This is not your guilt to take." Steve flinched, as if struck. Bucky curled into himself. "Honor his sacrifice. Keep moving."

They did. 

A sniper rifle killed with ease, cold, calculating from afar. Officers fell on the field, and a headless HYDRA regrouped. His hands shook when he cleaned his gun.

A shield slammed into soldiers, it’s owner plowing through lines of men. HYDRA fell backwards into its home front. Blood on his hands, a distant look in his eye. 

The war was a couple weeks from reaching its end. Right now, it could be anyone's game, so off the Commandos went. Back and forth and back and forth until his sightlines were all he saw. Phillips wouldn't look him in the eye anymore, just tossed a file in front of him and wisely backed away. Once, he had come up to Bucky with the obvious solution.  
"Morale is down, Barnes, all around the front. There are only so many stories we can make up about special ops leave before the men catch on."  
Bucky didn't respond.  
"You have the shield, don't you?" He gestured to the disc leaning lightly against the cot, coat of paint chipped and cracked.  
"S'not mine."  
"Well it sure as hell ain't his anymore, son." Phillips grabbed Bucky's arm and swung him around to face him, his chest heaving. "Grieving time is over. We need to finish this, and finish it now. We need Captain America."  
Bucky twisted out of Phillip's grasp. His face was unreadable.  
"No. Find someone else to dance your routine. I'm going to win this war, and I'm going to do it without that costume."  
Bucky picked up the shield, holding it close to his side, and walked away.

It was Steve's fourth week without sleep and things couldn't have been better. The Allied front was moving forward at a steady clip, and even conservative estimates said they'd be within tactical range of HYDRA's main munitions and aircraft bunker within the next two days. Steve shivered outside in the wind. Everything was cold here, even with super soldier serum running through his veins. The light snow bit at his cheeks and he tried to stay focused. The Commandos were standing around him but they kept fading into the edges of a train car and their voices were screams.  
"Rogers!" Phillips barked. He clapped a hand on Steve's shoulder. "Did you hear a word I said about this bunker's defenses?"  
Out of the corner of his eye, Gabe glanced at him worriedly.  
"Sir, yes sir." Steve chanted back. "Increased numbers of HYDRA flamethrowers and internal guards mean we need to make our attack swift and decisive. More recon intel is coming in the next few days."  
Phillips looked annoyed, then schooled his face back into a neutral expression. "Despite what you seem to think, Captain, I don't tell you these reports just to hear the sound of my own voice. This is life or death, for every one of you that goes."  
"That's why," Steve said above the Commando's murmuring, "I'm going alone."  
"Rogers," he warned.  
"I promise you, Colonel," and there was a sudden intensity in Steve's gaze, "HYDRA will not make it out of this war intact. I'll make sure of it."  
He moved in. 

Jumping onto the plane was always going to be a risk. Bucky threw Peggy a jaunty salute and clambered onto the back. 

Steve kissed her lightly and made the jump. He knew as well as anyone that the Red Skull was just a cog in a larger machine of oppression and war and killing him wouldn't end the war. Good thing it also wouldn't stop the intense satisfaction from Steve's fist meeting the Skull's face. He crashed into the pilot's room with all the subtlety of a train-wreck and the Skull aimed a blast at his heart. Steve raised his shield. 

The beam reflected off the disc (Thanks, Steve, Bucky thought,) and he aimed a few pot-shots at Skull through the blast. The tesseract spun out of the central console and the Skull's face turned ashen. Bucky didn't think, he didn't need to. He sprinted for the cube. A split second later, so did the Skull. Bucky crashed into him and they shoved at each other, desperately trying to grab the Tesseract.  
A hand closed around the cube.  
Bucky held it up in the air, his eyes wide with surprise. For a second, he could feel the whole universe spread out before him. He didn't know what he was thinking when he grabbed the probably nuclear power source of HYDRA, but the cube did. And there it was, the warfront and the world all laid out before him. It consumed his vision, but on the outskirts was the real reason he grabbed the cube. He reached out with his mind to touch it and--  
The Skull knocked it out of his hand and grabbed it with a frenzied motion. He shouted, a mixture of victory and euphoria and a touch of panic. The room was subsumed in light, and then the Skull was gone. 

As that blue cube melted through the floor, Steve rushed to the controls. The helmsman was gone, but that didn't mean the ship's payload was anywhere near secure. One look at the monitor and Steve swore aloud. The bay controls were locked: too close to landfall to pilot the bombs individually out of the plane.  
There went that idea.  
The only thing he could manipulate were the gyro controls, and even those had been partially shorted out by the Skull's poor decision making.  
He made his choice. 

Death, Steve decided, really wasn't that bad. After all, he'd been looking it in the eye his entire life. About time he sat down with him and had a chat. 

Death, Bucky decided, was a real bitch when it caught up to you. Maybe Death'd let him make a quick run for it, or play a game of cards, in the afterlife. He was at least due a rematch of some sort. Nothing much more to do.  
The radio filled with static and the ship crashed into the ocean. 

Seventy years later, Steve opens his eyes in a hospital room. For a moment, he's disappointed. Everything's too familiar, the sparse walls, a framed landscape on the wall. He sighs and lays back on the bed. Steve hadn't really planned this far. The radio drones on in the background, adding static to his thoughts. Wait. The nurse comes in, and Steve knows he'll be better off ignoring the alarm bells in his head. But he never really learned how to leave well enough alone. Nothing's right, and once he runs out into Times Square, it'll never have a chance to be.

A lifetime into the future, Bucky wakes up with a jolt. For a second, he's relieved. Then he remembers. Something's off about the room, the people, their smiles. But Bucky knows better. He couldn't have survived months in Zola's lab without learning how to play the long game. He goes along with it, for about a week, until the shoe finally drops. It's 2012, and they made the mistake of digging him out of the ice instead of the Tesseract. Bucky'll adjust. He has to. 

When a Norse god decides Earth is his playground, Steve is reliving his past in a boxing arena. The gloves are familiar in his hands from ages of testing right after the serum and he's itching for--well, not a fight. But something for his hands and heart to do to make his mind stop working overtime.  
Steve never thought about the after during the war. There was never really one to think about. Maybe some guys would survive, go home, tell stories, get married. If he was honest, he never expected to live past that plane crash.  
Fury comes in the room and Steve knows this is inevitable. There's only so long you can hide from the world before it comes in anyway. He doesn't have a choice. He never really had one. There's something that needs to be done. 

Bucky's languishing in a SHIELD base like he has been for the last few months. He's been asking for an apartment for ages, but SHIELD isn't ready to tell the modern world that they've dug up a relic from the 1940s just yet. He's their moderately useful trump card, and Peggy's organization specializes in hiding their hand.  
Fury flashes him a royal flush, along with a task to find the Tesseract.  
For a quick moment, his sister's there, beating him at cards again.  
"Better luck next time, James," she would laugh, and he would always brush it off, say he let her win.  
And Steve's there too, before the serum, his cheeks flushed and forehead hot.  
"Winning hand, Buck," and he would say, yeah, sure Stevie.  
But when the chips are down, he does what he does best. He gives in.  
"Once a soldier, always a soldier," he mutters to himself as he slings his gun over his shoulder. "Least this time there isn't anyone too important to lose."


	2. And Getting Back Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Bucky have their first mission. It goes about as well as expected.

In the time he was gone, Captain America had been immortalized in history, earning hero worship from Coulson and half of the SHIELD agents he'd met. Steve dances around the pleasantries and tries to get a feel for this new dynamic, this new world. 

Coulson looks at Bucky like he hung the stars, or, at the very least, knew someone who did. He waxes rhapsodic about the old comic books that the men used to rib him about. How did it feel being a kid sidekick and all that. Bucky feels odd seeing Steve on a trading card: even though he's wearing that stupid costume and smiling a huge grin that is absolutely fake, it's like the punk is waving hi across years and death.  
Of course he signed the godamn cards, with that agent's puppy eyes and Steve's stupid face, how could he resist? 

They re-enter society in Germany with a bang. A mockery of the American flag and death with a rifle. It feels nice to have something solid to whack again. 

Steve'd never really seen this side of the country before: all formality and pretense and full of peacetime interrupted. His Germany was always going to be a wasteland, covered in ashes and dust. This shining future though? He can protect that.  
Steve's back in his element, navigating the crowds with his accented German, his shield a heartbeat on his back. Tony is aerial in his flying machine and Steve's on the ground, challenging a god in a green cape. Oh well. Steve's seen weirder. 

Bucky takes out his gun from a distance and lets Stark distract the man who thinks earth is his playground. He takes a shot. The bullet pings off Loki's helmet. Before Loki has time to seek the shooter out, a second one goes through his leg.  
It's easy after that. Too easy. 

Steve's worries about the suspiciously quick capture are finally justified when lighting hits the ship. Loki tries to look contrite but mostly fails to hide his grin. Everything goes to new levels of terrible.  
They meet on the ground, a hammer and a shield, and a metal suit. Great combination. The man, (Thor, his old books on myths supply,) has the smile lines of someone who knows what happiness is. There's none of that now: he's terse and his movements, already jerky, become frantic whenever he locks eyes with Loki on the crest of the hill. 

It goes well, all things considered.

There's a soundwave that crashes through the woods and a beam of light that shines illogically bright. 

"You know what?" Bucky saunters out into the middle of the forest, tossing his gun gently to the ground. The weird Norse god is still smoking from Stark's last hit. "This is fine. This is great, in fact. Let's just, put down our weapons, and have a nice chat."  
Stark sighs, long and loud, and Bucky swears people can hear it all the way back on the ship.  
He has no idea how they manage to talk him down in the end. Bucky's no Steve. But, finally, the guy with the hammer comes onto the plane with them, and they drag a halfheartedly escaping Loki back into his corner.  
It's awkwardly quiet on the ship.  
"I thought you were dead," Thor says to Loki. He sounds heartbroken. Bucky inches out of earshot. He doesn't think he wants to hear the rest of that conversation. 

Steve doesn't think it can possibly get worse, but then they arrive on the helicarrier. The first time our destiny team's all in one room, he thinks, and we want to kill each other. 

Despite their teamwork in the forest, Tony barely spares Steve a second glance, except to critique his wording. The animosity is returned. Tony's self-made, talented, useful. Everything Steve has to work for and still can't quite reach. Tony is a man of this world, and Steve is stuck in the past, a relic forged by hands lost to time. Howard wasn't a kind man, but he was a good one. He's already in the shadows of one Stark, how can he escape one that looms twice as large?

Where Steve and Tony are rocky, Bucky and Tony are sharp, dancing circles of wit around each other with grins like feral dogs. Fury would later be heard saying that they got along like several important server banks on fire. He's the best friend Bucky has in this new world. Stark may have his father's propensity to throw his wealth around like rice at a wedding, but he's unique, in his own way. More cavalier and less sure. Better sense of humor to boot. 

Steve likes Banner immediately. It takes almost no effort to befriend the meticulous scientist: they both have the same love for humanity and unfortunate addiction to being part of something bigger than they are. The Hulk never bothers him. Steve's sure that if they ever do meet, they'll reach the same understanding. 

Banner is nice enough to Bucky, but always aloof, like he has something to fear. It reminds Bucky too much of how Steve had acted after the serum, throwing himself bodily into every conflict and always shaky in his own skin. Makes sense that Banner dabbled in the serum.  
According to SHIELD lab reports, Bucky's doomed to a similar fate.  
They sit him down and tell him those experiments in Zola's lab hadn't been a complete bust and what he'd really thought was the second coming of his self-preservation instinct was actually a knock-off brand of super solider serum.  
He can't complain too much: it explains all the weirdness for that year or so before the plane. At least it kept him alive in the ice. 

Natasha likes Steve because she thinks she knows his type. He's a straightforward idiot with a heart of gold, too scared to show the cracks in his facde, qualities that are admirable, but going to get him killed. Steve's a trophy waiting to be shelved, she thinks. But he hasn't led her through a battle with a hand on her shoulder when she stands back up, or beat her at cards with a suspiciously high number of full houses. And she hasn't led to him to a seedy bar owned by a gray-haired bartender with a penchant for Latin where they swap war stories for hours on end. At least, not yet.  
Of course she remembers the long nights, training under the hands of his partner. His blows were rough and his eyes wild and he taught her how to fight, how to clean up her own messes, and how it felt to be loved, really. As far as she knows, he is long gone, into the cold or into death. One is far better than the other. And she doesn't tell Steve. Some things are better off unknown. 

There's an attraction there, with Bucky. It's the dangerous sort, Natasha knows, the kind that leads to bad decisions and last minute pleading in a plane headed Nowhere. In him, she sees herself, sly, distant, effective. Broken into shards so small you can't even see the cracks.  
They're at odds immediately.  
She remembers a blond haired solider, his edges sharp but his commands decisive, and that brief moment after a particularly hard mission, with his head in his hands. They were partners for a time, mentor and mentoree on a path of crimson. Then he was gone. Natasha can't bring herself to pick up the pieces.

Steve gets to play peacemaker with Thor and the rest. Loki is definitely bad news, but Thor has hope in his eyes, and Steve can't bring himself to quench it. They're kindred souls, he and Thor, so Steve invites him to stop by later, after the fight that's never ending. 

Thor, who would be a fantastic drinking buddy under any other circumstances, Bucky just knows it, is reserved and angry. Thor is... defensive of Loki in a way that echoes in Bucky's head. It's familiar and disconcerting to watch. His eyes are lit with that blinding fire of justice and woe to anyone who gets in it's way. Bucky can dance around flames just fine.

The team's shaky, stumbling on new legs. Steve, self-admittedly, does some dumb things. Bucky, by others' admission, does as well. 

Tensions rise and tempers heat. Steve's standing right in front of that staff and it's whispering, just a little. Bruce and Tony yell about accountability and the big picture and Steve realizes he can't ignore SHIELD's shadows anymore. He goes looking. 

Bucky hears the staff like a com straight into his head, like the good ones he got assigned one time during a particularly tricky mission. (They ended up shattered on a restaurant floor.) It's a similar loudness to the Tesseract, the cosmos open before him and his heart burning like a star about to collapse. Best to just ignore it, the words about space and aliens and his sanity and saving what matters most. Better that way. 

Steve comes back with a folder full of blackmail and a gun in hand. 

Bucky shakes off past, cosmic mistakes. It's a brave new world, and he needs to be here for it. 

Loki breaks out. What a surprise. Everything goes badly. 

A pack of blodied cards slides across across the table. Something about seeing Steve coverd in blood hits Bucky hard. The real one had just disappeared into the air, no blood, no trace he was ever there at all. 

As Fury tosses them to Steve, like a final sentence to a story cut short, he looks, really, for the first time. He's catapulted back to his time on the show circuit, with the dancers that took him under their wing and days blurring together. There were kids like that, especially in the states, that came up to him after the show with bears and cardboard shields and publicity photographs. He grabs the card closest to him and places it gingerly in his suit pocket.  
He meets Clint, still shaky from mind control. He's easygoing, laughs a lot. Even in the face of destruction he drops a one-liner about where Loki can shove his staff. Steve loves him. 

The Battle of Manhattan ends the same way it starts: aliens everywhere, men flying, a hulk destroying ships and regular humans just trying to do their best. 

Bucky sits himself on a roof by the archer with his same sense of humor and redemption to earn. They hit it off instantly and make a competition over taking out Chitauri one by one. 

Steve fights on the ground, ferrying civilians to the outskirts of the city and taking as many hits as he gives. 

Stark falls out of the sky and a nuke explodes in the air. Bucky rushes to his side. "Ever had schwarma?" Tony quips and the sigh of relief is palpable. 

It's delicious.


	3. Full Tilt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky and Steve try to find their footing in a new world, but the past keeps catching up to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the long wait, but this whopper of a chapter is finally done!

They all go back, afterwards. Handshakes exchanged and contact info stored away and the events of the past few days covered in a haze of memory. 

Natasha and Clint return to SHIELD with no reservation. It's an easy decision. 

Thor takes his brother back to Asgard and holds his heart close. 

Tony's hands shake and his eyes are the kind of wild that Steve and Bucky recognize from years of living on a battlefield. They have developed a camaraderie, through alien debris and things to protect, but there's nothing Steve or Bucky can do when they wake up screaming each night just the same. He escapes to his tower and his machines, Bruce with him. 

Steve follows in the footsteps of Peggy Carter (he visits any chance he gets) and joins SHIELD for the next year, balancing romance advice from Natasha with a whole new world. 

Bucky takes a sabbatical for a time, trying out new foods, bar hopping with Clint, and trying to walk through Brooklyn without seeing ghosts. Occasionally, Natasha comes knocking on his door, and he starts moonlighting as a sniper again. What else is there to do?

Being out of one's own time is a kind of living contradiction: guilty to love the new world but unable to return to the old. The problem with staying in one place for so long is that eventually, despite all efforts, you start putting down roots. 

Steve hits up old record stores in his free time and takes long runs around DC. When he sees someone running the same route as him, he takes extra laps just to pass him. The half-annoyed, half-charmed smile Sam Wilson gives him is a familiar look. 

Bucky joins the dumb bingo nights in the SHIELD common room and makes the trip down to the Smithsonian on weekends.   
One time, he stops by the Vet Center. Bucky's there just to look around, but stumbles into a group session and is struck by the honesty of it all. On his way out afterwards, the head of the group stops him.   
"Haven't seen your face around here before—hope you liked the session." He held out his hand with a smile. Bucky took it hesitantly.   
"I'm Sam," the man said.   
"Barnes," Bucky replied.

\-----

Steve gets called out for a routine hostage situation in the middle of the ocean. Standard operating procedure for his strike force: Fury only assigns them if it needs to be fast and clean. Definitely not subtle. He's built up a bond of trust with these men, the kind only fighting together can make. They've saved each other more times than Steve can count, and he thinks that maybe, between these guys and the Avengers, the future might not be so bad.

Bucky gets tugged along by Nat on a routine collection. The main strike team would collect the hostages, and they would do the real work behind the scenes. No big deal. He learned long ago to let the shadier parts of his job be. 

Bucky's a bit less content with that justification when Nick Fury dies in his living room. 

Steve chases the perpetrator onto the roof, and gets his shield thrown back in his face. Like a ghost, the man is gone, and there's a flash drive covered in blood.   
He goes to the hospital in a haze; it's hard to even register Fury flatlining or shoving the drive behind a couple sticks of bubble gum. 

Nat is shaky and withdrawn in the morgue. Bucky tries to place a hand on her shoulder, but she doesn't respond. The drive is small in his grip. While he's going out the door, the head of the strike team, makes eye-contact.   
"Sorry to hear about Fury." Rumlow says. He sounds the furthest thing from apologetic. Almost satisfied. "See you back at the Triskelion for debriefing."   
Bucky eyes their backs as they walk towards the morgue door. He shoves the drive in a vent, and makes his way to meet Pierce.

Bucky had always told Steve he was too trustworthy, but surrounded by the bodies of his team in the elevator, Steve really believes it. Once again, he's on the run, and this time, with far less allies. It's a close call on the bridge: the water below him and an impossible path in front. But he keeps moving. 

The betrayal couldn't hit hard for someone who never trusted in the first place. Bucky makes it two feet into the Triskelion before he turns around and heads to the garage. He grabs Steve's old motorbike (given by a certain Stark on a random spree of philanthropy) and heads to the nearest public parking garage to hot wire a car.   
Bucky meets up with Nat at the mall, and, like he'd expected, she has the drive tucked in a pocket.   
Grief doesn't unmake a weapon: it only reforges it stronger. 

Steve is back to the basics again. Just him and one other team-mate, stuck sneaking through crowds and avoiding the powerful. Almost feels like a kid again.   
Natasha is a hard woman to know, and she's no Bucky, but she just might be enough. They plug their drive into a laptop and sneak their way to Camp Leigh, where memories linger in every corner. 

Bucky can feel the history of the place: it's all over the buildings and leaks out of the ground. The Steve in his memories spouts stories about training, strange medical tests, humorous antics. He spends most of the walk inside wondering if Steve had slept in that bunker, if he had run on that track. 

Beneath layers of steel and rust, they find Arnim Zola.   
The person who had killed thousands , experimented on more, was alive. They had died for nothing. 

Bucky's fist comes crashing into the nearest tower of electronics and Arnim Zola chuckles. "You haven't changed in the slightest, James. Still irrational, still weak."   
"You don't know anything about me." He stalks around the room, Nat strong against his back. There's a concrete enemy now, and that's partially worth the wild goose chase.  
Zola considers. "I might not, James, at least not anymore. But your old friend, who was it, Steven Grant Rogers? I know quite a bit about him."  
Nat swivels to face the bank of monitors. The small lights of electronics stretch infinitely off into the distance. "Neither SHIELD or HYDRA was ever able to re-create the serum. What are you talking about?"   
"You'll find out soon enough. I have to say, however. He was a fantastic starting point."  
The next punch goes into the monitor. 

The bogey hits and Steve staggers out of the bunker with Natasha in his arms and the world going blurry around him. He goes the first place he can think of.   
Thankfully, Sam has the patience of a saint, and the wherewithal to know when he's in over his head. He sends them to the back room to wash up and Sam stands, considering, in his living room.   
You never really leave the war, he mourns. He may be a licensed therapist, with a licensed therapist, but that still doesn't keep his head clear from the past and lost.   
It's for Steve Rogers, how can you not? Captain America has been his hero for as long as he can remember, though the worship was tempered when he came back to life. No real person deserves the curse of that pedestal.   
If he does nothing, they'll leave on their mission, only two strong, and fight HYDRA or die trying. Sam could even those odds, and less people would get hurt. Less people would have to mourn. Less people would never be Riley. And it's the right thing to do. Sam has never been one to back down.   
When Steve and Natasha return, he tosses a resume on the table and they hatch a strategy. 

The best way to take down a nest is to follow the rats back home, Bucky and Nat reason. With a little light interrogation on the way. Their first target is one Jasper Sitwell, and they follow him on the road during his commute. Sam is running reconnaissance in the sky, and jams his cell signal at the right time. They catch Sitwell in a dark stairwell, and he promises to lead them to the Project INSIGHT base. It goes suspiciously well for the next 30 minutes. Bucky almost isn't surprised when the Winter Soldier shows up and ruins everything. 

The fight is a fight, normal grunts with guns, abnormally good sniper. It goes by in a blur of thrown punches and bullets shot, until Sam makes his grand entrance midway through. He's a shiny target with killer aim and maneuvering, giving Nat and Bucky the opportunity to make their way to the center of the concrete slab.   
The Winter Soldier shoots a potshot at Nat, but goes in for Bucky. At close quarters, Bucky switches out his rifle for a pistol, and alternates between trying to survive, and getting decent shots in.  
Whoever he is behind the mask, he's giving Bucky a run for his money. He gets a shot into the Winter Soldier's leg and tries to switch off opponents with Nat when his legs are swept out from under him. Bucky's pinned up against the ground when Sam shoots down from the sky and launches himself at the guy. Bucky scrambles backwards as the two connect in a crash of debris and noise. The Winter Soldier's mask slides near his feet.   
Bucky stares forward as a familiar face emerges from the smoke. 

"Bucky?"   
"Who the hell is bucky?"

"Steve?"   
No response. He kept attacking.

Steve rides to his death in shock. How could Bucky have survived? The wound he thought had closed, has been cut anew and it might as well be the train all over again. Fury offers them a way forward, but Steve has eyes only for the battle ahead. He's going to have to face Bucky. And he needs to save him. 

Steve sneaks into the Smithsonian to steal his old uniform.   
Bucky jauntily saunters in, with a wink to the janitor, and takes his.   
Nothing like the familiar outfit to get you focused on the task at hand. 

Bucky breaks into the Triskelion with Nat and sends Sam on infiltration duty with Fury. They arrive in the coms room and dispatch the operators. Before they can go live, the door clicks and Bucky's old neighbor is there, pointing a gun at Nat's head.   
"Sharon," Nat says carefully, "You don't want to do this."   
"You're right, I don't." Sharon Carter lowers her gun and places it back into the holster. "I didn't know it was you, so I came up on my own. We've been on red alert for a while."  
They explain the situation and her face goes stony. She stares Bucky dead in the eye. "Give them the truth. They deserve to know."   
"Nat, that's your cue." Bucky slides aside and gives her the mic.   
As the Black Widow speaks truth to the power that had controlled her life for so long, Sharon and Bucky stand on lookout.   
"You know, this isn't as black and white as you think, Barnes." she says, facing the window.   
His eyes are trained on Nat's back, the curve of her shoulders as she lets her walls down. "Yeah, I know. That's why we're burning it all down, not just part of it."  
"SHIELD hasn't been a force for complete evil, and you know it. There are good people here, just trying to make the world better."  
"Then they should've chosen a better organization to do it with."   
Sharon swings around to face him. "You say HYDRA goes all the way back to the roots. How can you explain me, then? Hill and Fury, Barton and Romanov? There's nowhere else we could be doing this kind of good."  
Bucky chuckled. "Fury said that too, you know. He wanted to preserve what was left of SHIELD, build back up from the ashes."  
"Then why don't we? We have the means, and we have the opportunity." Nat finishes her speech and they can hear fights breaking out below.   
Bucky sighs. "It's more complicated than that. If we do, it'll be the same mess as before. Taking advantage of necessary lies to—"   
"So you admit they're necessary."  
Natasha walks over to join them. "Yes, we do. We could start something new, you know."  
"Nat, what are you saying?"   
"Keep track of the good ones, Sharon. I might know someone who can help." Natasha says. Above them, on the top floor, they hear a crash.   
Bucky reloads his rifle. "That's our cue."

Sam and Steve take on the Helicarriers. He's more thankful for the wings every minute as he soars around the sky. The machines are just taking off, which makes them easy prey. They crash both without a hitch, but by then the third is higher than Steve can reach.   
"Care to give me a lift?" he yells to Sam. "Only if you say you'll let me win next morning lap!" Sam jokes back. Steve smiles, and they head upwards. 

The entire world fades into noise as they stand across from each other, the Helicarrier looming around them. Bucky and Steve fight with 70 years and an eternity between them.   
The chip is inserted, and fire rains down all around them.   
Steve's soldier gets some good shots in.   
Bucky's soldier doesn't care anymore.   
But when both soldiers are poised above their missions, ready to kill, they can't do it. Something inside them, something time and memories and torture couldn't take away, stops them.

They let go. 

Bucky and Steve are pulled out of the water.   
When medical services arrive, the soldiers are nowhere to be found. 

When they wake, Steve and Bucky are treated to the finest of governmental hearings and funeral services for the alive.   
Both receive a manilla file with a story inside. Both will search for the Winter Soldier.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: learningthomas.tumblr.com


End file.
